SYDNEY — (BUSINESS WIRE) — April 27, 2009 —
Altium is serving notice that the old way of approaching electronics
design needs to change for good.

And the company is backing this with dramatic changes to how it prices
its solutions, changes which remove a key barrier to designers and their
organizations being able to design the new wave of intelligent,
connected electronic products.

“Electronics designers and their organizations must answer one question:
what makes me so special? This is the crucial question for
everyone seeking to more than just survive this recession,” said Emma Lo
Russo, President of Altium.

“What we’re announcing today is a way forward for all those electronics
designers seeking to harness the greater opportunities in this
increasingly global environment.

“By permanently reducing the price of our solutions, Altium is removing
a key barrier that stops electronics designers accessing everything they
need to take their design concepts to market, ahead of the new
competitors that continue to emerge. We’re helping them plug into a
continuous stream of new devices, technologies and developments that
keep them at the forefront of their industry. We believe taking this
holistic approach to electronics design, with the user’s experience
firmly at the center of the design process, is the breakthrough
organizations need."

It’s this holistic approach that will let electronics designers
differentiate themselves from their competitors. It allows designers the
freedom to discover and explore how and which new features and
functionality are added to their end product, as well as designing-in a
continuing, connected relationship with their end users, all from within
a single design environment.

Altium is opening up this holistic approach to any designer in the
world, with a dramatic, low-cost entry to Altium's electronics design
solution. Altium Designer is now available at a single, global
subscription price of US$195 per month, purchased in 12-month blocks.

Altium Designer's perpetual license price has also been permanently
reduced to a single, global price of US$3,995.

Both license options include 12 months’ software assurance which
delivers two major product releases per year, along with continuous
updates.

“The current recession is bad at the obvious level,” says Emma Lo Russo,
“but it’s worse on another: it’s camouflaging what’s already happening.
Electronics design is changing. Where it is done is changing. Those who
do electronics design are changing. What users demand of electronic
products is changing. And if electronics designers, and their
organizations, don’t change now, they are at risk of not surviving the
greater impact of globalization once we’re through the recession.

“In fact, the rule book of how electronics design is done, that has
served designers well over the past 40 years, is now increasingly
inadequate in the face of globalization.

“These old rules increasingly struggle to cope with the new programmable
devices, wireless technologies and increasing processing power. The risk
to designers is that the old way of doing electronics design will deny
them the new opportunities afforded by the convergence of these new
technologies.

“The old rules require a divide-and-conquer approach: divide the process
into smaller chunks, and conquer the complexity. The problem is that
this approach, of reducing the intent and broader view of the design to
a set of smaller, granulated problems, kills innovation at the higher
level.

“The artificial constraints imposed by having to choose a device or
functionality much too early in the design process is bad for design and
bad for innovation.

“Our announcements today are all about providing more for less for more:
more functionality and access to new devices and technologies than ever
before, for less than US$10 a day, making it affordable and easy for moredesigners around the globe to tap into the opportunity to pioneer
the new wave of connected, intelligent, next-generation electronic
products.”

Pricing and availability

Altium’s new pricing is available now, in the following options:

US$195 per month purchased as a 12 month contract, totaling US $2,340
per annum per user licence

US$3,995 per perpetual user licence which includes software assurance
for the first 12 months, renewable annually thereafter for US$1500 per
user license

Altium has also dramatically reduced the price of its desktop NanoBoard
NB2, its reconfigurable development platform. The desktop NanoBoard NB2
makes it easy to explore complex design and device trade-offs, move
functionality between hardware and software at will, and rapidly develop
systems within a graphical drag-and-drop, plug-and-play environment. It
now costs US$1,995. Find out more at
www.altium.com
or contact

Is Altium in serious trouble? April 28, 2009Reviewed by 'Maria Gonzalez'Hi,I think Altium is in serious trouble. They are reducing their staff in Europe an try to get some final money before their financial year ends in June. My boss wants to wait for their financial report in July, to see if they will make some positive figures, otherwise the cost of change to Altium (tool, setup, training)may be lost.What kind of strategy is this, if you reduce the prices by 70%? Is this a business model?Maria